Grand joins a long list of technical experts, industry luminaries, and featured speakers who will deliver a wide variety of talks at EE Live! 2014. The conference will be held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, March 31 to April 3, and will offer dozens of workshops, panel discussions, boot camps, tutorials, case studies, postmortems, and more. You can preview them all at the EE Live! Schedule Builder.

Known for his work designing consumer products and modules for electronics hobbyists, Grand is a former member of the legendary hacker group L0pht Heavy Industries. He’s spent almost two decades finding security flaws in hardware devices and also heads up product design, development, and licensing firm Grand Idea Studio. Grand shot to fame among engineers several years ago when he co-hosted Prototype This, the engineering entertainment program that ran on Discovery Channel (now available on Netflix).

Grand will talk about his work on the show in his Hardware Startup Engineering Summit talk entitled "Behind the Scenes of Prototype This." Composed of an electrical engineer, a roboticist, a materials scientist, and a special effects guru, the show’s team was charged with designing and building a unique and often crazy prototype for each episode. Grand will explore the details of his favorite projects, talk about behind-the-scenes challenges the team faced while working in a rapid prototyping environment, and share some insight learned on the show that can be applied to today's hardware startups.

He will discuss "Using Superpowers for PCB Reverse Engineering" for his Black Hat Embedded Security Summit presentation. Superpowers, normally used by super-heros in the battle of good versus evil, are also accessible to engineers in equipment used for failure analysis and verification of PCB fabrication and component assembly processes. In this mostly visual presentation, Grand will share his experiences using lasers, X-rays, and sound waves to facilitate PCB reverse engineering.

You can purchase an All Access pass to see Joe Grand’s talks and dozens of others at EE Live! 2014 through the conference’s official site -- discounted passes are still available if you register soon. Make sure to also follow updates about EE Live’s other programs, sessions, and announcements on the conference’s social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

First, I totally wish that you could make it to the show. (Sad face here!) Unfortunately we do not do any live streaming, but we will be doing heavy coverage online and even a live chat with some of the speakers. Stay tuned and hope that you can make it to a future EE Live!!